Best 35 quotes of Jill Lepore on MyQuotes

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.

After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred and undeniable," and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident." This was mroe than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science.

All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained.

And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.

And that's the point! Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force strength power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.

...but everyone tries; trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either. Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.

Most of what once existed is gone... Nature takes one toll, malice another... most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept... (it) is called the historical record, & it is maddeningly uneven, asymmetrical, & unfair.

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable." -Professor Charles Homer Haskins

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.